John Cotton

John Cotton (4 December 1585-23 December 1652) was an English Puritan clergyman in Boston, Massachusetts who became known as the preeminent theologian of late 17th century New England. He was the grandfather of Cotton Mather.

Biography
John Cotton was born in Derby, Derbyshire, England in 1585, and he graduated from Trinity College, Cambridge in 1598. In 1612, he became minister at St. Botolph's Church in Boston, Lincolnshire, and he was minister for 20 years despite his strongly Puritan and anti-Catholic beliefs. In 1633, however, a crackdown on nonconformists by the Church of England forced Cotton and his family to emigrate to New England in the Americas, where he became the second pastor of the Boston church. He drafted New England's first constitution in 1636, and he legalized the enslavement of captives taken in just wars. After the Pequot War of 1637, the first English slave ship to leave the Americas, Desire, took a cargo of captured Native American slaves to Isla Providencia off Nicaragua, where Africans were being kept as perpetual servants. Cotton was also responsible for banishing Roger Williams, who had blamed much of his trouble on Cotton, and for advocating Congregationalism over Presbyterianism. He remained a minister until his death in 1652.